Mark Rein is the guy you really want to talk to at Epic for licensing U3. He sets the price of the license according to the size of the game you are building, your distribution methods, expected revenue, and he even considers other software taxing your budget and cuts fees where he can.

Simply one of the best guys in the industry. You get the same license and support, regardless of your project, but the price is adapted to your studio.

The second place Crytek fails is they have the worst support...ever. You will get assistance from other developers on the dev forum before someone from Crytek finally gets around to fielding your inquiry. They have no system of tracking requests. A request on the closed dev forum, restricted to licensees, can set for two weeks until you figure it out yourself or some other developer sees it and says, "Hey, this worked for us." Atrocious customer service.

On the other hand, Epic has the greatest team for handling issues I have ever seen. When something pops up it is assigned a tracker and then placed into the hopper with a specific person tracking and handling your problem. It gets fixed.

"Mark Rein is the guy you really want to talk to at Epic for licensing U3. He sets the price of the license according to the size of the game you are building, your distribution methods, expected revenue, and he even considers other software taxing your budget and cuts fees where he can."

I didn't know that.

I thought it was a flat 500k rate, which I think is exceptional considering how great flexible Unreal Engine 3 is. Cryengine 3 is phenomenal as well, but no indie developer really needs it or could afford it at that price.

Going back to some of the above posts, I'm fairly confident that the price is adjusted based on the studio and type of license purchased. Not sure how the Nexuiz guys would have afforded it if it was at a flat rate of $1.2m ;)

Going back to some of the above posts, I'm fairly confident that the price is adjusted based on the studio and type of license purchased. Not sure how the Nexuiz guys would have afforded it if it was at a flat rate of $1.2m ;)

Whats the difference between a UDK or SDk or the 1.2million one? I never knew it worked like that. And big ups to Morganfell for explaining the way customer service works with these companies and actually making it clear to understand. I never knew that either, thanks

Epic uses the UDK for indie devs and there will be a UE4 version of the UDK after it releases so you can build high quality games without paying a dime.

There are also engines like Outerra and Unity which are also indie-dev friendly.

The price above is for commercial use from multi-billion dollar corporations. $1.2 for them is like penny and dime chump change.

Next-gen games SHOULD NOT have higher dev costs with all the cost-effective tools being released to cut down on both gameplay mechanics, infrastructure stability and asset management.

Pubs will no doubt use this kind of misinformation to get people to believe all game development is rising like a mofo and will charge you an arm and a leg because they can (sort of like what Capcom is doing brainwashing people into thinking disc-locked content had to be done otherwise they wouldn't make any money).

$1.2 Million probably covers the cost of 7-8 good software engineers for a years time. Considering that the alternative of do-it-yourself would also cost a bunch of testing time, the engine is definitely worth it.

Pretty sure the royalties are for the free version of UE3. Both UE3 and CE3 have a free indie SDK that allows small companies to use the high end tools without having to fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars up front.

And you're right, it cost Guerrilla Games upward of $60 to design their engine and game from scratch (KillZone 2). Some studios do this because they have specific goals that they want the engine to accomplish.

But $1.2 million for a commercial use is a good price for an AAA title given that like BF3, ME3 or COD, these games make hundreds of millions in sales revenue.

Most Unreal Engine games on console look and play like ass. Only Batman and Gears have impressed me by the use of that engine. This gen, Cryengine 3 looks a whole lot better. Its a shame that the engine had to come out late in this generation of consoles and cost higher that its competitor, a lot of games could have benefited from the used of of the Cryengine. At least by the looks of it, Unreal Engine is going to bring it next gen.

Not sure why you've got disagree's because I agree. Gears 3 and Arkham City are the only really impressive UE3 games I've seen on consoles this generation. Battlefield 3 and Crysis 2 on consoles impressed me far more. The lighting and physics involved, especially Frostbites ability to aid the rendering of such inctricate destruction on 6-7 year old hardware is more impressive than anything UE3 has done.

Only thing that impresses me about that engine is its ease of use across a wide variety of games/genre's because I know that in some cases, certain engines just don't go with certain genre's.

@tmss726...Mass Effect looks horrible on consoles. In fact, it's a bland looking game across the board.

Unlikely. It only supposedly cost 1.2m for this specific developer. Crytek and Epic will usually do a consultation with you, and assess how much the licensing fee should be for your project. Whether it's a AAA blockbuster game, or just some small indie game that's not going to make massive profit.

which is why every one and their dog is making safe bets FPS/TPS cover system games that are mostly garbo. Games are too expensive to be creative. Make a sequel and get rich , guaranteed money so just half ass it. Then we can say "going back to our roots for part 3"" cough gears, resistance, socom ETC..

In the olden days, licensing the UE2 cost about $750k. These days, if it is a big budget game, then you can negotiate with epic. If would guess it would be between $500k and $1mil, but I have no evidence to back that number up.

The price is high but the demonstration videos are absolutely amazing. You can literally set up a level in an hour. I've used Unity, and it's an Indie studio's best bet. My programmers were able to work with it fairly easily, though Android development is a PAIN.

If I could, I'd use CryEngine. But 1.2 million is a big leap of faith. It's up to CryTek to make the engine as attractive as possible. I've looked up Frostbite 2, but the info on that engine is very obscure since EA wants to keep the engine to itself (and rightly so).